Hacker News: laurencerowe

New comment by laurencerowe in "Latest Airbus single aisle aircraft innovations"

laurencerowe — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:54:27 +0000

I just took this flight and that was not my experience. Food was served in the first 2 hours and the last 2 hours of the 10 hour flight leaving 6 hours of dark for sleep. Unfortunately my toddler did not want to sleep beyond his late nap so I was up for the entirety of it.

New comment by laurencerowe in "I'm a USB-C Maximalist"

laurencerowe — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:41:31 +0000

> and an EU adapter (which, off the record, also works for UK outlets so it covers anywhere I normally travel to).

What type of adapter is this? EU and UK plugs are very different.

New comment by laurencerowe in "The firefighting system of the Van der Heyden brothers in 17th century Amsterdam"

laurencerowe — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:24:14 +0000

James Braidwood established one in Edinburgh in 1824.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Braidwood

New comment by laurencerowe in "Africans Are Turning to Starlink"

laurencerowe — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:36:49 +0000

Unfortunately it can’t since their cell size will never be sufficient for more than a small number of customers in an urban area. Mobile data cells here are a few blocks radius rather than the 10-20 miles in rural areas where Starlink really shines.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Africans Are Turning to Starlink"

laurencerowe — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:34:39 +0000

I had the same problem in San Francisco with Comcast. The only alternative was wireless service (which was somehow much slower than my iPhone) or slow fixed wireless as my street doesn’t get fiber. Ended up getting my partner to resubscribe to Comcast as a new customer.

Unfortunately Starlink will never be able to make substantial inroads into urban areas since their cell size is far too large to serve a high of density customers well.

New comment by laurencerowe in "The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment"

laurencerowe — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:36:10 +0000

Wasn’t booting other operating systems supported from early on (two months after release of M1)? It was reverse engineering the graphics hardware that took time and effort.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)"

laurencerowe — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:36:01 +0000

Sometimes companies demand you print/sign/scan a document.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

laurencerowe — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 07:06:05 +0000

I am very pessimistic about the economics of nuclear power but Finland is basically the best case scenario for it.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

laurencerowe — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 07:03:49 +0000

> You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.

There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

laurencerowe — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 07:01:06 +0000

Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

laurencerowe — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:52:34 +0000

Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage.

Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.

The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

laurencerowe — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:35:58 +0000

The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)

The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

laurencerowe — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:18:40 +0000

All of the EPR builds in Finland/France/UK have seen enormous construction cost (3-4x) and time (decade+) overruns. France expects its EPR2 builds to cost about 30% less but even if they manage to hit that target it will still be extremely expensive.

New comment by laurencerowe in "San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs"

laurencerowe — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:09:44 +0000

My electricity bill is roughly 1/3rd 'CleanPowerSF Electric Generation Charges' vs 2/3rds 'Current PG&E Electric Delivery Charges'. The big problem is that PG&E covers most of rural California so its urban customers have to cover the high costs of compensation and prevention from delivering to fire prone rural areas.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Waymo Premier"

laurencerowe — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:51:07 +0000

Living in San Francisco I've not seen the taxi exemption for California anywhere. New York City taxis are exempt like most of Europe.

My kid is too young for a booster city. It's pretty impractical to take a child seat or booster with you unless you plan to hire a car the other end. When I travel back to see my family in Europe I take the train from the airport. So we bus and Bart to the airport even though it would be much easier with luggage to take a taxi.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Waymo Premier"

laurencerowe — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:46:20 +0000

My kid is 2. New York City and most EU countries (including Spain, Portugal, UK, France) allow children to ride in taxis without a car seat.

This makes it far more practical for people to live without a car - hard to imagine in most of the US I know. As most such trips are low speed around town (e.g. getting to and from a train station or airport) it seems a reasonable trade off.

You of course need a car seat in a private car.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Waymo Premier"

laurencerowe — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:38:46 +0000

I think this is more a design problem with US road infrastructure. City streets are much wider than in other countries which encourages drivers to drive more quickly and allows them to pay less attention. We'd have far fewer pedestrian and cyclist fatalities if we didn't require streets to be so wide.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

laurencerowe — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:02:26 +0000

Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections.

To completely decarbonise we probably will need to eventually make liquid fuels for long distance air travel. But it may make more sense to do that nearer the equator to maximise the return on the capital investment by running it constantly rather than only during the summer.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Waymo Premier"

laurencerowe — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:46:03 +0000

Driving is very safe at city speeds for those inside the big metal box. Less so for the pedestrians and cyclists on the outside.

New comment by laurencerowe in "Waymo Premier"

laurencerowe — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:44:39 +0000

> Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.

Buses are fairly fast where bus lanes exist. With the kid I now take the bus far more often rather than walking 15 minutes to the Bart station and spending an extra 5 minutes each end navigating Bart’s incredibly poorly located lifts at each end.

I bought an e-bike once the kid was 2 and it has been pretty great. It would be absolutely wonderful if San Francisco created a network of real separated bike lanes or slow streets.